This week Torchwood cracked the difficult nut of how to deal with suicide bombers (next week: what is the meaning of life?). A woman discovers herself in the headquarters of the Fifth Emergency Service, unable to remember how burglars died. Soon enough she’s wrestling with her inner sleeper agent, part of a cell who are waking up in unwitting humans to try and destroy the world.
So Torchwood likes to deal with grown-up themes. What are we learning from this? Torture is okay when executed by attractive people? You can treat those suspected as demi-humans however you so please? ‘Extreme measures’ are fully justified when faced with what may as well have a sign around its neck saying ‘unparalleled threat’? It might as well advertise the BBC Action Line at the end to provide advice on how to surrender your civil liberties.
Still, once we’ve humanised the main enemy character a bit, we can forget all about torturing and win them over with emotion of some guff. Oh, but shoot them anyway. Because it’s Torchwood, and this counts as tortured ethics of some form or another, making ‘hard choices’. Really, the scriptwriters could freelance penning scripts for neo-cons, the way some of this nonsense spins out.
So how do you overcome an unstoppable alien force without using more than Jack’s allotted one death per episode? That’s where Torchwood’s ability to have more technological solutions thant the Bat Utility Belt comes in handy. This is largely thanks to Three-Button Toshiko, a woman who can solve any problem anywhere with a two-screen computer and a penetrating gaze. Need a military computer network hacked? Transceiver disabled with an EM pulse (you really would think that at least one advanced alien civilisation would have discovered how to make their technology resistant to EM pulses by now, wouldn’t you?) Then Toshiko is your one-stop shop for plot resolution.
Just to complete my list of groaning, I watched this online and accidentally shut the browser half an hour in. I’ve had to watch this episode one and a half times. That is not good maths. There is some good maths news: the special effects look really quite alright when watched on a six-inch window. Still, the good maths doesn’t outweigh the bad maths (a positive and a negative makes an etc etc).
Read the Torchwood episode 1 series 2 review here.
